The BadIf you shoot both still and video, the T3i's controls can be frustrating to operate, and it's not terribly fast for burst shooting sports, kids, or pets.

The Bottom LineFor the money, the Canon EOS Rebel T3i is a great choice for dSLR videographers--though the cheaper T2i can still suffice if you don't need the articulated LCD--and it's a solid choice for creative still shooters. But though the image quality and general shooting performance are top-notch, if you're upgrading to capture sports, kids, or pets, the T3i may not be able to keep up.

If you didn't think the 60D was overpriced when it shipped, you will now. The Canon EOS Rebel T3i (aka the EOS 600D), the 60D's younger and cheaper sibling, offers the same basic camera with some corners cut--most notably a slightly less well-constructed body and a (purposely?) stunted burst shooting speed. You can also think of it as a slightly more expensive T2i, with the addition of an articulated LCD and a few features for the auto-always crowd. Either way, the T3i remains a solid if unexciting follow-up to its predecessor, although one that seems to cater more to videophiles than still shooters.

That's not to say it compromises on still photo quality. Overall, the T3i has an excellent noise profile, unsurprisingly similar to that of the 60D's. JPEGs look very clean up through ISO 400, and even at ISO 800 you really have to scrutinize to see the beginnings of detail degradation; at ISO 1,600 the noise becomes more obvious but still isn't too bad.

ISO 400 is sort of my tipping-point sensitivity; to shoot action outdoors, I generally have to bump up the setting to at least ISO 400 in order to reach a sufficiently fast shutter speed. And because few consumer cameras are fast enough at shooting burst raw+JPEG, the in-camera JPEG processing has to be decent as well. The T3i fared pretty well under these conditions. Overall, I consider shots at this setting good enough to use, but I still wish I would have been able to shoot raw to clean them up.

Canon's JPEG processing remains very good. Even at ISO 1,600 I couldn't obtain unambiguously better results processing the raw--Canon seems to optimize for exposure at the expense of sharpness, and I couldn't get sharper results without losing some shadow detail (you may do better). At ISO 3,200 I was able to achieve a significant reduction in color noise without losing too much shadow detail. And by ISO 6,400, I started to see hot pixels as a side-effect of the in-camera noise reduction (those white spots) in the JPEGs.

On all other counts the photos looked good on the default settings, though my favored setting with Canon models is Neutral with sharpening bumped up a few notches. Colors look both relatively accurate and saturated; metering and exposures are consistent and predictable; and the dynamic range is broad enough to allow a reasonable amount of highlight and shadow recovery.

As usual, the video looks very good. There's some moiré, but not a lot of rolling shutter, and moving edges look surprisingly sharp. At its highest quality, it seems to deliver an average bit rate of roughly 45Mbps. It offers the same great set of frame rates and manual exposure controls as the 60D, including highlight tone priority for fine-tuning high-key exposures. Though the built-in microphone is mono, it sounds surprisingly good, and there's a wind filter along with the same 64-level sound controls. Canon also incorporates the Video Snapshot feature from its camcorders--it lets you snap up to 8-second clips--and some in-camera special-effects filters, too.

I'm not as fond of the new 18-55mm IS II lens as the old kit lens; unfortunately, I didn't have the old lens available to do direct comparisons, but the new lens seemed to have more issues with fringing than the old. The new lens claims an extra stop of image stabilization, but I didn't find it more effective (of course, it's always possible that I'm a year shakier). The 18-55mm kit lens displays visible but not terrible asymmetric barrel distortion at its widest. In shots with the previous version of the lens, the distortion looks more symmetrical, but I don't have exact comparison shots--they put up scaffolding months ago, which prevents me from replicating my test shot.

The camera's performance remains fast, but, surprisingly, in some cases not quite as fast as its predecessor's. It powers on, focuses, and shoots in about 0.3 second, with a fast 0.3-second shot lag in good lighting and solid 0.6-second in dim (a tad slower than the T2i). JPEG shot-to-shot time is also good at about 0.4 second; raw takes a little longer at about 0.5 second. Adding flash bumps that up by another couple tenths of a second. Its burst rate is essentially equal to the T2i's, but both are at what I consider the slowest acceptable continuous-shooting speed for a dSLR and slower than less-expensive competitors like the Nikon D5000 or the Pentax K-x.